Mullis: Unexpected guest status prompts unexpected behavior

My oldest was coming home from college for the first time in several weeks, prompting me to do something I still don’t fully understand.

I cleaned my house.

I don’t mean a little tidying. I wiped down sinks, removed out-of-season decorations, and de-shoed the front entry like I was hosting Thanksgiving.

It wasn’t until I was looking up how to properly clean the vaporizer someone left in the bathroom after the last head cold that I started to question what I was doing.

Why did I scrape the old wax cube out of the wax-melting thing and replace it with a cinnamon-scented wax cube hours before she arrived?

Why did I demand my youngest change the sheets on my oldest’s bed where no one has slept since the last time we changed sheets?

Why did I pull the dead leaves off the houseplants?

These are things I do for guests, not my kids. More accurately, these are jobs my kids would help me do for guests.

I didn’t intend to clean the house that morning. I came home from a meeting and found the sink was full of dishes and the washer was full of wet clothes and the TV remote was under an avalanche of my son’s math homework. I was just going to do a standard five-minute fix before diving into writing.

Then, I started breaking down boxes and dusting the upstairs desk.

At first, I thought it was a little writer’s block keeping me from work, but I actually had a project in mind and was anxious to start, so that wasn’t it.

Besides, if I were cleaning out of writer’s block, my heart wouldn’t be racing. My heart only races when guests are coming because a broken part of my brain believes most guests will eventually run their fingers atop my bookshelves and JUDGE.

My oldest knows there’s dust on my bookshelves. She is the one who helps me take care of that stuff before guests arrive. In fact, she’s my middle manager who nags the other two into action while I stuff the unfolded laundry into the hallway closet.

Even if she was coming home to judge, she knows about the hallway closet and all my other panic-cleaning bolt-holes. Fooling her would be pointless, so why was I folding all the couch blankets and closing the door to her brother’s room and opening windows just enough to chase out the stale air?

Then it struck me – I just got served another “your baby is an adult” card.

Usually, my oldest deals these cards out, saying things like, “We’re going out for drinks later,” which makes me hesitate before remembering she is 21. Or she’ll mention having to call maintenance because there was a drain fly infestation in the apartment sink, which makes me remember she’s old enough to sign a lease.

This time, however, I dealt the card to myself. She was coming here, which was when I started sniffing the dog’s head for traces of that skunk he ran into a few weeks ago.

I remember this shift with my mother. One weekend I came to visit, and she told me she put fresh towels on the bed in case I wanted to shower. It was guest protocol – the stuff I usually did for myself or helped her do when someone else visited.

I had become the someone else.

As I walked through my guest-ready house, I spotted a photograph near the kitchen, the one of my children in grade school, all round cheeks and pumpkin smiles.

My oldest will never be ‘someone else,' but I can’t deny it – she no longer lives here.